NYT: 2 Forecasts Should Project a Better Year

London's ZenithOptimedia released a report today suggesting that the overall advertising recession has ended and 2003 will see small growth. Another research firm, Barry Group, are issuing a report on the newspaper sector today, also predicting growth in that sector. This follows similar announcements reporting ad growth in television, online and beyond.

[marketingfix]

Some of Amazon.com's associate site operators are up in arms over the big retailer's spidering activity as it uses a bot to find broken links. [internetnews.com: Top News] 13

Ad Age: Identifying Internet Marketing Techniques That Work

This news has slowly dribbled out over the last couple of weeks, confusing me and others. It started with the IAB announcing that it was going to double ad spend in Europe by educating advertisers. Then Microsoft chipped in stating that they were starting a 'best practices' initiative. Then last week MSN UK announced the launch of an initiative to promote online advertising to blue chip companies, with the article reporting that it followed "a similar digital ad awareness initiative by the Interactive Advertising Bureau."

Anyhow it turns out that these initiative are basically one and the same, lead by MSN:

The Initiative is spearheaded by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and supported by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The MSN team and online marketing consultants sifted through nearly 500 case studies contributed by Dynamic Logic, Eyeblaster, Unicast, agencies, marketers and publishers to create a library of best practices across industries such as automotive, retail and consumer package goods. The group has prepared four examples and plans to present 25 best practices reports per quarter on a dedicated Web site. MSN's Advantage Marketing site also offers access to the studies.

[marketingfix]

Now Here's A Way to Fight Back Against Spammers.

Heh.  Now Here's A Way to Fight Back Against Spammers

Try installing SugarPlum, a spam "honey pot" which gives Spammers tons and tons of bad addresses to send to.

Sugarplum -- spam poison

 What is Sugarplum?

Does this answer your question? :)

Sugarplum is an automated spam-poisoner. Its purpose is to feed realistic and enticing, but totally useless or hazardous data to wandering address harvesters such as EmailSiphon, Cherry Picker, etc. The idea is to so contaminate spammers' databases as to require that they be discarded, or at least that all data retrieved from your site (including actual email addresses) be removed.

Sugarplum employs a combination of Apache's mod_rewrite URL rewriting rules and perl code. It combines several anti-spambot tactics, includling fictitious (but RFC822-compliant) email address poisoning, injection with the addresses of known spammers (let them all spam each other), deterministic output, and "teergrube" spamtrap addressing.

Sugarplum tries to be very difficult to detect automatically, leaving no signature characteristics in its output, and may be grafted in at any point in a webserver's document tree, even passing itself off as a static HTML file. It can optionally operate deterministically, producing the same output on many requests of the same URL, making it difficult to detect by comparison of multiple HTTP requests.

Sugarplum is free software, distributed under terms of the GPL. [_Go_]

[The FuzzyBlog!]

MSNBC/Newsweek: The World According to Google

It's true, Google may be the coolest thing ever.

What if you had a magic tool that let you find out almost anything in less than a second? Millions of people already have it—and it’s changing the way we live

Great long feature article telling the whole story behind Google, its founders' ambitions, its impact on world order, its boon to marketers and its incredible financial success. Includes video and audio interviews with Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as a chance to submit questions for a live discussion with the story's author Steven Levy on Dec. 12, noon EST.

The piece contains this trivia nugget: Google's famous algorithm's name, PageRank, is a tribute to co-founder Larry Page.

[marketingfix]

freep: Internet spammer can't take what he dishes out

Last month Mike Wendland published a story highlighting the wealth of Alan Ralsky, one of the world's most prolific spammers. Slashdot picked up the article bringing Ralsky to the attention of a huge number of tech savvy individuals. Subseqent to this exposure it appears that the internet community has begun to take its revenge - an eye for an eye, a mail for a mail.

Ever since I wrote a story on him a couple of weeks ago, he says he's been inundated with ads, catalogs and brochures delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to his brand-new $740,000 home. [..]

"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me."

My heart goes out to him ;-)

[marketingfix]